Come enrolment period, parents and students alike face the huge burden of sky-rocketing fees in education. In UPLB, this is a result of the amalgamation of different state mechanisms and university policies with the purpose of absolving government responsibility to education, taking the form of Education Budget Cut, Large Lecture Class Policy, Dorm Fee Increase, and the current re-bracketing in the Subsidized Tuition and Financial Assistance Program, known to all as STFAP.

 

Through STFAP, students are classified in Alphabetic Brackets (A, B, C, D, E) based on their family’s annual income. Such classification determines the cost of education they are set to pay in the university. It operates under the principle of social justice, maintaining that “those who can pay should pay more, those who cannot shall be subsidized”. However, the administration’s collection of about P500 million and a meager P25 million expenditure for STFAP beneficiaries from 2007-2009 clearly attests that such tuition scheme is only an instrument for the university to earn from the students whom they are supposed to serve.

 

When STFAP was first introduced to the University of the Philippines in 1989 to justify the then impending tuition increase from P30 to P200 per unit, students knew right away that it is the university’s mechanism to amass more income to compensate for the budget supposedly received from government subsidy. True enough, its re-bracketing in 1994 raised tuition to P300 per unit, and in 2007, to P1000 per unit. This goes  to show that STFAP is never separate to the bigger issue that is Tuition and other Fee Increase.

 

Currently, another re-bracketing is set to be implemented for all UP systems. From the default Bracket B where incoming students pay P1000 per unit, freshmen students will now have to pay P1500 per unit, as the default bracket is moved to Bracket A. This re-bracketing is just but another form of Tuition Increase for the country’s premiere state university.

 

SAKBAYAN and other student institutions like the University Student Council have continually supported the studentry in strongly opposing the STFAP. More than two decades since its implementation, we have never been wrong in saying that the issue is not the "rich providing for the poor", but has always been government neglect to education. 

 

There is a greater necessity for a united struggle to expose and oppose anti-student policies now that we face greater state neglect and commercialization policies. Through our unified actions against state-abandonment of education, let us bear witness that social justice in education can only be attained in the absence of pretentious reforms to education. Social Justice is Right to Education!

 

JUNK TOFI!

SCRAP STFAP!

ASSERT FOR HIGHER STATE SUBSIDY!